Townsend Brown on Electrogravitics, 1980

[Jan Lundquist]

Quoting from his letter to "Harry I" on March 11, 1980, added below:
https://www.thomastownsendbrown.com/mis ... harry2.htm

"Our work now is largely theoretical, departing in many respects from the original measurements of force to a study of gravitational radiationpossibly of optical frequency) which appears to induce a self-potential in massive high-K dielectrics. In one way, this is the converse of the effect where forces are produced."

Gravitational radiation refers to a form of sidereal radiation arriving from outside our solar system. According to the Cady report, Townsend had been tracking the sidereal periodicity ( measured by star positions, not by sun/moon cycles) of the observable effects of this mysterious radiation since (at least) 1937. By the time of this letter, Townsend had moved on to observing the changing electrical measurements in rocks, that seemed aligned with this same force, that the files at the link above will have separate entries and correspondence relevant to his work with petrovoltaics.

Townsend was observing the optical radiation, even before he joined the Navy. Knowing that the ultraviolet shift was a particular interest of the lab director, he used his knowledge to try to pry his way into the NRL, writing to inform the man (Hurlbert, I believe) that he had collected some data on the subject. There is no return correspondence in the family files that I have seen, but we know that the director didn't take the bait.

So Townsend, being Townsend, went about achieving his objective another way. When the head of the Radio school in San Diego suggested that the NRL might benefit from the knowledge of one Seaman Brown, who was now teaching the class in the place of the assigned instructor, I hope the director remembered that he was the brash young man who had gotten the brush off earlier, and gave him some props for persistence.

[natecull]

Oh wow, letters! I didn't realise those existed, or that they were up on the Townsend Brown website. I need to go read these.

Gravitational radiation refers to a form of sidereal radiation arriving from outside our solar system.

Hmm. "Gravitational radiation" not coming from the local gravity maximum (the centre of the Earth or the Sun), but from intergalactic space. That would be the LeSage pushing theory, I guess. So Townsend was still contemplating that in the 1980s. Possibly thinking of it being neutrinos? (Morgan seem to keep hinting about them.) Or maybe not even that.

It's almost like Townsend's "gravitational radiation" is the inverse of Einstein's version of it.

I've never understood how there can be gravitational waves which oscillate without there being a positive-negative polarity to gravity, but then I've never got my head entirely around either Special Relativity or tensor maths, let alone putting the two of them together.

I mean I would guess that the standard behaviour of gravity would be a negative curvature - if we're not thinking about torsion, which GR doesn't - and therefore that GR gravitational waves would have to be accompanied by a tiny amount of temporary positive curvature, or at least positive curvature relative to what there was there a microsecond ago, though maybe not a total positive curvature. Or maybe (since GR waves are "quadrupole radiation" not dipoles like EM waves) it's not a matter of changing the curvature but just stretching/rotating it in some sense so the amount of curvature remains constant. But all this fiddling about seems a bit foolish to me. If you've got the ability to make waves in the curvature of a medium at all surely there has to be some way of a wave generating a positive curvature? And if gravity is negative energy/curvature then where the HECK does the positive energy/curvature go, and HOW? I would assume that it must go into the matter that generates the curvature, and further that the act of it going into matter must be mediated by the strong force, since the strong force is located precisely where all the mass also is, which seems a heckuva coincidence to me. But linking gravity to the strong force doesn't appear to be an active research topic that interests physicists today and I can't work out why. Maybe it's just outside the energy range of our experiments so there's no data to motivate the equations?

Anyway: if Townsend's "gravitational radiation" was the exact opposite of Einstein's gravitational radiation, then one might assume that it might involve a positive overall spacetime curvature. But my stubbornly pre-Einsteinian physical intuition may be hopelessly wrong there.

Nate